Fabrizio was impressed by all these details; they gave him a tightening of the heart; this was the price he must pay for the magnificent luxury, so cool and clean, that caught the eye in his charming rooms in the palazzo Sanseverina. He was obliged to enter this dirty office and to appear there as an inferior; he was about to undergo an examination.
The official who stretched out a yellow hand to take his passport was small and dark. He wore a brass pin in his necktie. “This is an ill-tempered fellow,” thought Fabrizio. The gentleman seemed excessively surprised as he read the passport, and his perusal of it lasted fully five minutes.
“You have met with an accident,” he said to the stranger, looking at his cheek.
“The vetturino flung us out over the embankment.”
Then the silence was resumed, and the official cast sour glances at the traveller.
“I see it now,” Fabrizio said to himself, “he is going to inform me that he is sorry to have bad news to give me, and that I am under arrest.” All sorts of wild ideas surged simultaneously into our hero’s brain, which at this moment was not very logical. For instance, he thought of escaping by a door in the office which stood open. “I get rid of my coat, I jump into the Po, and no doubt I shall be able to swim across it. Anything is better than the Spielberg.” The police official was staring fixedly at him, while he calculated the chances of success of this dash for safety; they furnished two interesting types of the human countenance. The presence of danger gives a touch of genius to the reasoning man, places him, so to speak, above his own level: in the imaginative man it inspires romances, bold, it is true, but frequently absurd.
You ought to have seen the indignant air of our hero under the searching eye of this police official, adorned with his brass jewelry. “If I were to kill him,” thought Fabrizio, “I should be convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty years in the galleys, or to death, which is a great deal less terrible than the Spielberg with a chain weighing a hundred and twenty pounds on each foot and nothing but eight ounces of bread to live on; and that lasts for twenty years; so that I should not get out until I was forty-four.” Fabrizio’s logic overlooked the fact that, as he had burned his own passport, there was nothing to indicate to the police official that he was the rebel, Fabrizio del Dongo.
Our hero was sufficiently alarmed, as we have seen; he would have been a great deal more so could he have read the thoughts that were disturbing the official’s mind. This man was a friend of Giletti; one may judge of his surprise when he saw his friend’s passport in the hands of a stranger; his first impulse was to have that stranger arrested, then he reflected that Giletti might easily have sold his passport to this fine young man who apparently had just been doing something disgraceful at Parma. “If I arrest him,” he said to himself, “Giletti will get into trouble; they will at once discover that he has sold his passport; on the other hand, what will my chiefs say if it is proved that I, a friend of Giletti, put a visa on his passport when it was carried by someone else.” The official got up with a yawn and said to Fabrizio: “Wait a minute, sir”; then, adopting a professional formula, added: “A difficulty has arisen.” On which Fabrizio murmured: “What is going to arise is my escape.”
As a matter of fact, the official went out of the office, leaving the door open; and the passport was left lying on the deal table. “The danger is obvious,” thought Fabrizio; “I shall take my passport and walk slowly back across the bridge; I shall tell the constable, if he questions me, that I forgot to have my passport examined by the commissary of police in the last village in the State of Parma.” Fabrizio had already taken the passport in his hand when, to his unspeakable astonishment, he heard the clerk with the brass jewelry say:
“Upon my soul, I can’t do any more work; the heat is stifling; I am going to the café to have half a glass. Go into the office when you have finished your pipe, there’s a passport to be stamped; the party is in there.”
Fabrizio, who was stealing out on tiptoe, found himself face to face with a handsome young man who was saying to himself, or rather humming: “Well, let us see this passport; I’ll put my scrawl on it.”
“Where does the gentleman wish to go?”
“To Mantua, Venice and Ferrara.”
“Ferrara it is,” said the official, whistling; he took up a die, stamped the visa in blue ink on the passport, rapidly wrote in the words: “Mantua, Venice and Ferrara,” in the space left blank by the stamp, then waved his hand several times in the air, signed, and dipped his pen in the ink to make his flourish, which he executed slowly and with infinite pains. Fabrizio followed every movement of his pen; the clerk studied his flourish with satisfaction, adding five or six finishing touches, then handed the passport back to Fabrizio, saying in a careless tone: “A good journey, sir!”
Fabrizio made off at a pace the alacrity of which he was endeavouring to conceal, when he felt himself caught by the left arm: instinctively his hand went to the hilt of his dagger, and if he had not observed that he was surrounded by houses
